Re: Thoughts on directions for a rebooted SWICG

The issue I have with Mastodon is its server is written in Ruby and is very
inefficient. And as a result it is not green energywise.

I am looking at putting together first a Node.js implementation similar to
Mastodon as a reference implementation to work from as I find Rails very
strange (also) then look at a full RDF based implementation, followed by an
implementation in a static language like Rust or C++.

I am gemming up on all the standards involved first and having a look at
some of the existing implementations that we do have.
I am compiling a list of links for the whole area too as well which I will
probably put on GitHub.
There are some existing resource lists :-
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ https://activitypub.rocks/
And a page for implementers :-
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/pub/guide-for-new-activitypub-implementers
Activity Streams seems to be the actual data side of the ActivityPub
protocol used for communicating between "mailboxes" :-
https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/

It would be nice to have protocol implementations in all the main languages
TypeScript, JavaScript, Java, Rust, C++, Python, ..., adhering to a
standard API structure isomorphic to the problem domain / specs, and to
have UML based documentation
With ActivityStreams like db and db adapters for main dbs like GraphDB and
more traditional DB's like PostgresSQL.
So ActivityStreams as the data model, and ActivityPub as the communications
protocol running over HTTP(S)

Regards,

Aaron

On Wed, 30 Nov 2022 at 22:12, Erin Shepherd <erin.shepherd@e43.eu> wrote:

> Eight (!) years ago, I kicked off what became *AcitvityPub* with an
> e-mail to the SocialWG mailing lists linking to a draft of a protocol I
> named *ActivityPump*; I hoped but never imagined it would end up being
> quite so influential.
>
> It's been nearly four years since the ActivityPub specification was
> published, and never has it felt felt more urgent that we find a way to
> revisit aspects of the standard *together*. None of what follows is in
> any way gospel, these are just my thoughts; but I feel one big thing we've
> been lacking is direction and this is an attempt to give that
>
> --
>
> The challenge, as I see it, with developing anything involved in the
> social web, has always been that everyone's developing their own thing.
> That's really exciting, and it makes the ecosystem incredibly vibrant, but
> it's also quite troublesome, because you end up with 15 people working on
> 15 different things, rather than working towards a cohesive whole. The
> ecosystem and the network have suffered from this; I feel like one of the
> reasons things never really got off of the ground here after the SocialWG
> closed is that there was no obvious direction.
>
> So I would like to suggest that we pick *themes* to work on - one
> initially, with scope to add more as those are established. Perhaps these
> might eventualy feed into the charter for any future ActivityPub WG. We
> should, in general, try and focus on areas causing user issues or friction
> in the network today.
>
> I think there's a general sentiment across the fediverse that our biggest
> problems are to do with inadequite tools to handle *moderation and
> harassment*. There's a mix of implementation improvements and protocol
> improvements that need to be made in this area, but I think it's important
> that we do the protocol development *in particular* outside the scope of
> any single project because it's the sort of thing which is likely to become
> a mandatory feature.
>
> Some particular sub-areas of focus that I can think of:
>
>    1. *Spam Filtering/Sockpuppet Prevention*
>    Or: how to stop people from setting up new servers to bypass your
>    blocks (without caving and resorting to allow-list federation)
>
>    I made a post about this yesterday
>    <https://blog.erinshepherd.net/2022/11/a-better-moderation-system-is-possible-for-the-social-web/>
>
>    This one's a relatively complex addition, but I think it's vital.
>    2.
> *Indirect Harrassment via Replies *Presently, threads are "backwards
>    authenticated" via the *inReplyTo* field from the comment to the
>    parent, but there's no forward authentication from parent to comment. Even
>    if I block you, it's possible for you to reply to my posts, and while my
>    server won't show your replies when looking at my post, other servers which
>    saw your replies will.
>
>    I don't think allowing people to make "unapproved" replies is bad; but
>    I do think that when looking at a post, implementations *should*
>    de-prioritise such replies (think of Twitter's "more replies have been
>    hidden" feature, which normally hides a bunch of cryptocurrency spammers)
>
>    I think this is a relatively straightforward protocol change,
>    involving adding a way to indicate a post is in "approved replies" mode,
>    and distributing those approvals. (I think Hubzilla has already implemented
>    something vaguely - but not completely - along these lines)
>    3.
> *Better tools for moderators *This is perhaps the least well defined
>    point (and the one which, in some ways, requires the most implementer
>    buy-in), but I really think we need to specify both the existing reporting
>    protocol, and extend it to (a) allow withdrawing reports and (b) add
>    coments, so server moderators can communicate with each other "in band".
>
> I don't think this is the only topic area worthy of discussion, but I
> think it's by far the most vital. There are other areas I see as very
> important long term (e.g. codifying a way to move accounts without the
> cooperation of the server you're moving away from, simplifying the
> cross-server follow flow, and *eventually* supporting nomadic
> identities), but I think the solutions to those are less well defined, and
> the need is less pressing.
>
> I'm very curious to see the group's thoughts.
>
> (One other thing I think would be a *good* thing to do is to revise the
> AP spec and explicitly document the holes we left because we couldn't find
> agreement with actual practice; but that would be a task for any
> ActivityPub WG that is formed, which I would support)
>
> -- Erin
>


-- 
Aaron Gray

Independent Open Source Software Engineer, Computer Language Researcher,
Information Theorist, and Computer Scientist.